Experts question delayed action on coronavirus

Beijing: Forty four more people have died of the novel coronavirus in China, taking the death toll in the outbreak to 2,788, Chinese health officials said on Friday, amid growing criticism from experts and the public that the epidemic would have been less severe if the authorities acted when the first confirmed case was reported in December.

Among the deaths reported on Thursday, 41 were from the epicentre Hubei province and its capital Wuhan, two in Beijing and one in Xinjiang, the National Health Commission said in its daily report.

A total of 44 new deaths and 327 confirmed cases were reported on Thursday from all over China, far lower than the earlier days, it said.

The overall confirmed cases in the mainland have reached 78,824 by the end of Thursday. In all, 2,788 people have died of the disease so far, it said.

As virulence of the disease slowed, criticism of Chinese officials' attempts to hide the outbreak in its early stage was highlighted by the official media on Thursday in a rare public criticism of the system of secrecy in governance.

The outbreak first surfaced in December last year until it became severe by middle of January, becoming a full-fledged epidemic causing massive devastation in the country, a report highlighting the shortcomings was published by the state-run Global Times on Thursday.

While China's massive response in trying to localise the virus to Hubei province with strong measure like locking over 18 cities including Wuhan with over 50 million people came for praise from the World Health Organisation (WHO), criticism is also growing at home over why it was not nipped in the bud. The situation should have been better if the control measures were taken earlier Zhong Nanshan, said a leading epidemiologist who was also among those in the expert groups dispatched by the central government to the epicentre Wuhan.

Under the scanner is China's famous top down approach under the ruling Communist Party of China (CPC) with little power to local officials.

Several top-down authorities, constantly shifting blame on each other for mishandling the outbreak earlier, have now been engulfed in a public opinion crisis, with people calling for an improved decision-making process in the country's healthcare system, the media report said. Zhong said three major coronavirus-related epidemics in the 21st century - SARS, MERS and COVID-19 - had offered a lesson that countries should act quickly to prevent them from spreading

further.